This blog is about understanding how Oracle database works.The learning process never ends and this is espeacially true when one tries to understand what is hidden in the magic box called Oracle database.

Wednesday, 28 January 2015

Recently I was working on integration of OVM Manager with Oracle EM Cloud Control 12cR4 and I had to enter the "Oracle VM Manager URL" a.k.a. as "Core management port" which is reported at the end of OVM Manager installation. The default value for this port is 54321. As I was not in position to get this post-installation report because the installation was performed by another company, I had to find out the right port. The definition should be entered in the form: tcp://:.

EM Cloud Control and OVM Manager Integration Screen

OVM Manager Installation report sample

One of the the first ideas was to check local firewall configuration and see if there is anything for port 54321.

But I was still not 100% sure, if the iptables showed the right port. So further digging through the documentation revealed the right port. The definition of the "Core management port" is hidden in .config file under the name COREPORT in OVM Manager home directory /u01/app/oracle/ovm-manager-3/.config

The explanation for the configuration items can be found in chapter "5.1 Backing up and Restoring Oracle VM Manager" and obviously in my case the port used was actually the default one 54321.
The .config file should be part of the backup.

Hope this post will shorten search time for this kind of information to my readers.

Tuesday, 27 January 2015

Recently I was involved in an upgrade project on Linux platforms to Oracle 12c (12.1.0.2) and the customer wanted to name the owners of the Oracle SW distribution according to their company standard. So instead of using "grid" and "oracle" OS account names they wanted to have the names which would start with "svc-" and continue with unique non Oracle standard name for either grid infrastructure or database software. Besides using this names as owners of grid and database software we
used them also in the names of the GRID_HOME and ORACLE_HOME directories
according to Oracle OFA suggestion.

So no problems with those names during installation and database creation. However, when we wanted to patch the grid infrastructure and Oracle home with latest patches, the Opatch utility returned with an error that it can't parse the path to Oracle grid infrastructure. I immediately recognized the problem and the only remedy was to uninstall both grid and database SW. And then bang, another surprise, the Oracle 12c deinstallation procedures crashed as well. This time the reason was in checking the ownership of the distribution (grid or oracle).

The regular expression used to find the owner of the distribution in the script is /.*?\((\w+)\).*/
String returned by "id" command is:

The $1 returned variable gets value "oinstall" instead of svc-xxxyyy and this causes deinstalltion script to fail. The right expression would be /.*?\((\w+\-\w+)\).*/

So how one can manually deinstall database home and grid infrastructure home? For ORACLE_HOME deinstallation one can follow Doc.ID 1624580.1 and run:

cd $ORACLE_HOME/oui/bin./runInstaller -silent -detachHome ORACLE_HOME="/u01/app/svc-xxxyyy/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1" ORACLE_HOME_NAME="OraDB12Home1"This operation succeeded without any problems. Deinstalling GRID_HOME was slightly more complicated and actually at the moment of writing this post there is no document on MOS relevant for manual deinstallation of grid infrastructure with configured Oracle Restart. The suggestion from Oracle support was to follow "How to Deinstall Oracle Clusterware Home Manually ( Doc ID 1364419.1 )" which was relevant for 11gR2 but not 12c. Actually I have performed the deinstalltion in two steps:

Why I said in the title that this will make you cry - because you have to start it all over again and the Oracle Installer doesn't warn you about the problematic hyphen during the installation process when all prerequisites are run.So after being working so many years with Oracle products I was really angry with myself that I was caught on such stupid mistake.

My training seminars

About Me

I have more than 20 years of experience in working with Oracle products. I began in 1988 with Oracle Database version 4 while working for the City of Ljubljana, where I had charge over the city's municipal and geographic information systems.

More recently, I have specialized in performance optimization, having developed my own tool set for monitoring performance and analyzing trace files.

In addition to sharing my knowledge through conference talks, I am conducting technical seminars organized either by Oracle University or myself.

I am very proud of two highly respected memberships: OakTable network in 2005 and Oracle ACE in 2009 and Oracle ACE Director in July 2010.

When not working with Oracle products I enjoy flying as private pilot (PPL(A) with night rating) with my Mooney M20E year 1966, call-sign G-ATOU. Prior Mooney I had an old Piper PA-28-140B Cherokoee, call sign D-EHFK and I have crossed almost all Europe with her.